Colin Kapp - The Unorthodox Engineers

They descended from the cabin, Fritz and Jacko choking quietly in the acrid air which caught at their noses and seared their lungs. Nevill, more acclimatized, was surveying the sky anxiously. Above them the swirling cloudbanks, smokey-red trailing into purple and black, plunged across the darkening sky so low that Fritz had an almost compulsive desire to put up his hands to see if he could touch them. There must have been a strong wind above, for the cloudrace was certainly moving at a significant clip, yet on the ground the warm humidity was almost deathly still, as though a sheet of glass insulated them from the driving turbulence above.

“Looks like a storm,” Nevill muttered in a worried voice.

“Is that bad?” asked Fritz.

“Terminal if you’re unlucky enough to be out in it. Let’s hope it’s a wet storm. They’re decidedly uncomfortable, but not usually fatal if you can get to shelter quickly enough,”

“Why, what happens?”

“Nothing spectacular if you can find shelter from a hundred kilometre per hour damp sandstorm, and if you happen to have sufficient alkali available to neutralize the rain on your skin.”

“Neutralize the rain?” said Fritz, his voice rising. “What the hell is in it?”

“Oh, about five per cent sulphuric acid plus a trace of hydrogen chloride with a little free ionized chlorine. Stings like crazy, I can assure you. But it’s better than a dry storm.”

“I’ll buy it,” Fritz said helplessly. “If a wet sandstorm is equal to an accelerated metal descaling process, what’s a dry storm equal to?”

By now Nevill was deeply concerned, scanning the furious cloudrace with worried and experienced eyes. They were still three hundred metres from the nearest part of the base, with Jacko and the driver close behind.

“I think you’re going to have a practical demonstration of a dry storm, Lieutenant. If the smell of ozone becomes intolerable or if you hear anything like a bee buzzing don’t hesitate —just drop to the ground as fast as you are able. If you can find a hollow then roll into it, but whatever you do, be quick.”

“A bee buzzing?”

“Air ionization path, the prelude to a lightning bolt. The cloudrace generates several megavolts, and it packs a current that can fuse you very neatly into the sand. The carbon from the body reduces a great many metal oxides in the ground so that the resultant slag forms a remarkable range of glasses.” He looked round and Fritz saw the concern in his eyes. “I’ve seen it happen—not pretty!”

“Forget the chemistry lesson,” Chimed in Jacko. “I never could see myself making a very convincing paperweight.”

“Then drop I” said Nevill, suiting action to the words.

They all hit the ground. Fritz’s nose didn’t have time to detect the ozone, virtually paralysed as it was by the existing acridity, but his ears did register the sudden buzz which Nevill had anticipated by a half second. Then the lightning discharge, a crack of vivid energy a mere thirty metres distant. The noise and the shock-wave of its passing stunned them momentarily. By the time they had collected their wits only a generous patch of fused sand and a choking concentration of ozone marked the spot where the bolt had struck.

“Bad!” said Nevill, “Worst I’ve seen for some time. It’s striking low ground, which means we have no possible cover out here. Best to crawl back nearer to the cat—but for God’s sake keep your heads low.”

“But—” Fritz protested.

Another bolt of lightning, bigger and nearer than the first, stabbed into the sand behind them like the bursting of a shell, followed by three almost simultaneously in the near vicinity.

Desperately slowly the party crawled back towards the cat, which stood as the pitifully-low high-spot of this particular area of terrain. On all sides of them now the jagged lightning cut into the ground with burning shafts of vicious energy, like the arrows of retribution fired by some crazed electric god. Then a shaft burned down on the cat itself. The vehicle sagged in on itself and molten metal seeped down its flanks and dripped onto the red sand of Tazoo.

“Treads!” Shouted Fritz van Noon, spitting sand. “The bloody treads are metal !”

“Jesus!” muttered Jacko, “we’ve been travelling in a glorified lightning-conductor!”

Then mercifully it began to rain. Nevill turned his face to the stinging, acrid precipitation and let out a howl of relief. A few seconds later they were running like half-blinded madmen through the corrosive waters in the direction of the base camp, heedless now of the cracking lightning which had withdrawn to the edge of the rain belt. They were fortunately within a few steps of the base when the wall of sharp, abrasive sand, whipped to fury by a fantastic driving wind, bore down upon them out of the deep purples of the approaching night.

“Welcome to Tazoo, Lieutenant!” Colonel Nash beckoned him into the office.

Fritz explored the still-smarting skin on his face and hands, and was still painfully aware of the puffiness around his eyes. “Thank you, Colonel. That was quite an initiation ceremony out there!”

Colonel Nash smiled fleetingly. “Unpremeditated, I assure you, but the weather is part of the reason you’re here. A ground-cat is the toughest machine available, but as you saw for yourself, it’s totally incapable of standing up to the environment. The low pH of the rain conspires with the sand to etch and tear the guts out of any transportation contrivance we’ve yet imported to Tazoo. When you consider atmospheric chlorine, hydrogen chloride, free sulphuric acid, plus high humidity and extreme ultraviolet radiation together with an additional nightly sandblast, you can guess that corrosion prevention isn’t the least of our troubles.”

Fritz shuddered involuntarily.

“I must admit,” said Nash, “that I haven’t always seen eye to eye with you before on the subject of unorthodox engineering, but if you can come up with a reliable way to transport the archaeological teams around this place I’ll at least be open to persuasion. Certainly no orthodox methods can give us transport on Tazoo at a cost less than the total budget for the entire mission.”

“What facilities have we?” asked Fritz.

“Anything you can find, basically. If you need anything shipped out from Terra you’ll need a damn good case to get it because of shipping costs, not to mention the time-delays on freight movements. Certainly we can’t afford to bring any more vehicles out here to be ripped apart. I’m relying on you to delve into your unorthodoxy and come up with something practical.”

“What progress has been made here?” asked Fritz.

“A little, but slowly,” said Nash, “largely because of the aforementioned transport limitations.

Nevill’s team have uncovered some real architectural monstrosities, but the real prize will be finding anything like technological artifacts. If they can do that, and if they’re half as weird as the rest of this planet, it will require all of your peculiar genius to identify and interpret them. We’re expecting to find some very unorthodox engineering from a culture which died around the time the last ice-age began on Terra.”

“Have there been any signs of a highly scientific culture?” asked Fritz. “The reports I’ve read don’t go into much detail on that.”

“The preliminary survey party found signs that the Tazoons had visited both of the moons of this planet. And we’re reasonably certain that they also reached the next planet sunward in this system and actually established a base there.”

“All this sounds highly promising,” said Fritz. “But a hundred thousand years is a long time. Would there be anything left of machines and mechanisms after such a period?”